Christopher Whiteside is a Conservative activist who lives and works in Copeland with his wife and family.
Chris is a recent chairman of Cumbria Conservatives, a former member of Copeland Borough council, and an Honorary Alderman of the City and District of St Albans. He is a former Conservative parliamentary candidate, and stood in the 2015 Mayoral election in Copeland.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Whitehaven Golf Course

There have been a number of post on this blog about the planning issues with regard to Whitehaven Golf Course.

The history of council and government decisions on this site has been a dire chapter of mishaps which does nobody a great deal of credit. It was built in the wrong place and several years later we still do not appear to have a satisfactory resolution of the impact of this on the right of way through the site.

To my astonishment, I find that the large banks of earth which have been erected on the side of the site, blocking a number of attractive views, do appear to conform to the planning application passed by Copeland Borough Council's planning panel. Sections of the dry stone wall which were shown in those plans as being retained have been removed, but this was at the request of Cumbria County Council's highways department. It was the opinion of County Highways officers that the relevant sections of wall were a traffic hazard.

The third issue is the sewage disposal. The original planning applications for the golf course involved a connection to the main sewers. The developers applied last year to the Environment Agency for permission to discharge sewage into a tributary of the River Keekle instead. This application was refused a few weeks ago.

Copeland council's Enforcement officer and an Environmental Health officer visited the site this week to check what is happening about this. They were shown the new clubhouse which the owners are in the process of constructing. It is currently a building site and is unlikely to be completed for a number of months. So there will not be any need for sewage disposal for a while yet.

Council officers have discussed with the owners the recent unsuccessful application to connect development to a septic tank. The Environment agency insisted that the owners must connect the development to the public sewer system. They asserted that they are already looking into the cost of pumping the sewage up towards the public sewer system at Red Lonning and they are planning to be connected to the public sewers before the development is complete.

There was no evidence of effluent being discharged into the Keekle River.

This situation will have to be kept under review: we don't want a repeat of the previous problems of poor enforcement.